Heavylift / Breakbulk

A 10 km record

Germany’s Kahl group of companies set a new heavylift weight record recently, and received an award from the European Association of ­Abnormal Road Transport and Mobile Cranes (Esta).

In May 2015 the first Goldhofer G2 I K600 high girder bridge was handed over to the Kahl group of companies, which is headquartered in the western German city of Moers. The unit has successfully been deployed at ­several sites since then. Its particularly beneficial deadweight to payload ratio ­allows operators to reduce axle loads on the 2 x 24 axles even when transporting the heaviest kinds of freight, which constitutes a unique ­selling point worldwide in the transport industry.

At the beginning of 2018 the Kahl group set a new road transport world record. The operation involved transporting a 535 t 1100 KV UHVDC from Siemens, which is the most powerful transformer in the world. It only had to be shifted over the relatively short route of less than 10 km in Nuremberg, from the plant to an inland port.

The convoy’s ­total weight, including the vehicle configuration of one Goldhofer unit pushing and two pulling, came to 875 t. It had an overall length of 63 m, a width of 7.5 m and was 6.1 m high. Kahl’s project manager ­André Krause said that “we used this transport concept, which we designed over many months of preliminary work, for the first time here. Thanks to Goldhofer’s heavy-duty and self-propelled modules coupled in para­llel, we were able to minimise the overall length of the combination and guarantee the manoeuvrability needed for critical passages, such as the Minerva bridge underpass.” Special Goldhofer software additionally helped align the freight in terms of its weight distribution and centre of gravity.

A Franconian night and French evening

On 24 January at 10 p.m. the extreme transport set off slowly on its journey, arriving in the inland port of Nuremberg the following morning. There the cargo was transhipped to a barge headed for Antwerp, from where it embarked on its 3,300 km maritime leg to China. For Kahl specialist Krause the record-breaking weight of the transport operation was “a successful premiere, because three more tasks with such giants are scheduled for us.”

This and other projects of its kind were certainly the basis for the Esta jury’s decision to bestow this year’s award for ‘transport services with a trailer and load whose gross weight comes to more than 120 t’ on Kahl. The festive acknowledgment in the presence of 360 industry representatives from across Europe was held in Paris on 26 April this year.